What do you meter off of when the scene is not evenly lit in landscape?

[Andrew1]

Lots of good suggestions on the technicalities of how to manipulate the information when it isn't what you want. You have to know the capabilities of yourself and your tools. If you don't have all the tools then you need to figure out how to work around that shortcoming. If you are taking shots that push past the boundaries of your camera then you need to shrink that range with lighting or filters or expand that range with HDR or similar processing with other tools. I don't think anyone has mentioned my usual method for landscape light problems so to the very good responses above, I'll just add - wait. AM, PM, noon, sunny, cloudy, tomorrow, next week, whatever. Problem areas are usually lessened by cloudy diffused light or at the least, are easier to deal with.

[ajohnw]

I'm confused. So in that first scene, the photo is from RAW, and the two pictures-in-picture are from the camera's JPEG rendition of the same RAW? The camera automatically adjusted the brightness in creating the JPEG?

No the bright patches in the 1st one are selected areas in a jpg straight from the camera. The selected areas have been brightened the rest left as it came out of the camera. There generally is a lot of dark detail buried in jpgs that can be bought out if needed.

The other 2 are shots developed from raw.

I always have my cameras set on best quality jpg plus raw and often post process the jpg rather than the raw file. In these 2 the tone curve used to do the raw conversion was very very extreme. I did it as part of the process of learning what the camera can do and out of curiosity as well. I'm not suggesting the raw conversions are good shots. They are flat boring and uninteresting and only intended to show how much is in the image captured by the sensor.

What I did with this one is this. Adjusted the light levels so that they made some sense and lost some of the cloud detail. Now I have more practice with PP I suspect I could keep it more or less as per the jpg. Looking at it now I feel I have over sharpened it as well.



John
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[rambler4466]

John, if you readjust your sharpening, take notice along the edges of the clouds. I think I see a gray fringe that is brought out by sharpening.

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tu...sharpening.htm

Scroll down to the images of an eagle head and note the frame "radius pixels too large" and you can see the slight fringe appearing along the edges of the head.

[ajohnw]

Yes thanks. These days I do feel it's well over sharpened. The worst aspect with halo's was the trees on the skyline. In fact the forground tree has so much haloing where it's in front of the cloud some parts have a large decrease in contrast and haloing can clearly be seen in places.

Noticing that Rawterapee has a couple of new features now I downloaded the latest version. It may have an easy solution to this problem. The tonal range that is sharpened can be limited. Basically it always falls off at the bright end. The main application I use can use others as plugins so using several isn't a problem especially as it can do most things itself. It just sends the image to the application and grabs it back when it is closed.

Actually as it's the first time I tried doing so much PP on a shot I was rather pleased with it. Even went there specifically to take the shot.. It's in a well wooded valley with little direct sun light. I started from the jpg I posted earlier with the brightened up squares. Thanks to Colin for showing me what can be done from time to time. Colin wont like me using the jpg as a base though. These days I am getting much better at setting a sensible raw conversion tone curve when it's needed but if the jpg will do it .............!

Going on my experience with monitor changes less and less sharpening is needed as they get better and have more dynamic range in particular. They have all been calibrated. That has improved too but has never been hopeless. Trouble is it leaves me wondering how others see the shot. and then of course how I see other peoples shots. Some one on flickr who saw the shot said maybe a bit over sharpened. To me now it's well over sharpened.

John
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